digital music and the music business

Avoid An Overwhelming Flood Of Fake Fakebook Friending With This Easy Trick

We've previously discussed how services that sell fake Facebook fans have begun clicking Like on other fan pages so that their paid fake activities can elude Facebook's automatic filters. This has caused problems for bands from appearing to buy Likes when they haven't to raising costs for promoting their posts to fans on Facebook. While there's not an easy solution to this situation, I recently found out about a means by which Facebook pages are targeted for fake likes that you can easily eliminate.

The Negative Effects of Fake Social Media Fans

There's been lots of coverage of musicians and other individuals seeking attention or seeming social proof who buy fake social media fans. Over the last year or so there's been a related rise in the effects such maneuvers are having on bands who didn't buy fake fans.

For example, Petey Graves of Red Seas Fire discussed the problems they were having with fake Facebook fans last Spring.

Sometimes fake fans are purchased for a page by a competitor who wants to make the page's owner look like a fraud or cause other problems. The Daily Dot recently described a situation where their Twitter account was targeted with fake Twitter fans by a Twitter fan-selling service. There were multiple possible reasons for so doing:

"To damage the Daily Dot’s Twitter brand, retaliate against a story that resulted in them shuttering their YouTube botting business, and prod us and other news organizations into giving them more free press."

One of the biggest problems, in addition to looking like a fake, is that social media services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are now taking down media and accounts that appear to have purchased fake likes or fans. For example, at one point a Daily Dot video was targeted with fake likes leading to YouTube pulling that video.

In the earlier case I wrote about involving Red Seas Fire and other bands, they appeared to be receiving fake Facebook likes by sources that were likely trying to diversify what they liked so Facebook wouldn't throttle them.

So the automated solutions of large corporate entities such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have led to new problems.

How To Avoid New Targeting Schemes

Jaron Schneider recently wrote about one tool these fake likers are using to quickly identify Facebook pages to like to diversify their process.

Some Facebook pages have been receiving huge numbers of unrequested fake likes after appearing on Facebook's International Page Suggestions list. Page Suggestions are when Facebook suggests a page that you might want to see based on your interests. It seemed to be a great way for Facebook to encourage pages' growth whether they bought promotions or not.

But now fake Likers are using those suggestions to streamline their work process so they aren't identified as spammers.

To stop this particular route of discovery by fake Likers, go to your page's settings and scroll down to "Similar Page Suggestions" where you can remove yourself from Facebook's default agreement.

It's not a guarantee but one quick way you can lessen the chance of having all your hard work undermined by a flood of fake Facebook likes.

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is currently relaunching All World Dance. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.